When Google made their “page speed is now a ranking factor” announcement, it wasn’t a significant new ranking factor but rather that it is significant because it means Google wants to use usability metrics to help rank pages. Your site speed should be a priority as slow sites decrease customer satisfaction and ...
With all the excitement and planning that comes along with a New Year, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with newfangled ideas. You probably have a long list of SEO tactics in the pipeline for 2011. Finding the resources, whether time or money, is the real trick. The point of this post is to minimize your to-do list by covering 32 SEO tactics that you shouldn't focus on. If any of these buggers have made it onto your 2011 task list or are still lingering in the queue from years past, go ahead and cross 'em off.
Meta tags are the beginning of most SEO training, for better and worse. I contemplated on how to introduce this topic because we always hear the bad part of meta tags, namely the keywords meta tag. One of the first things dissected in any site review is the misuse of meta tags, mainly because they are at the top of every page in the header, therefore the first thing seen. But we don't want to get too negative, meta tags are some of the best tools in a search marketer's repertoire.
There has been quite a lot of discussion lately about the use of rel=canonical and we've certainly seen a decent amount of Q&A from SEOmoz members on the subject. Dr. Pete of course blogged about his rel-canonical experiment which had somewhat interesting results and Lindsay wrote a great guide to rel=canonical. Additionally, there seem to be a few common problems that are along the following lines
Some weeks ago my coworker Leandro Riolino published in our blog an experiment he was working with. The idea of the experiment was to try link to a page A from a page B with 3 different anchor texts providing value of all those anchor texts.
There are a lot of great posts and resources about the rel canonical tag, but they can be hard to identify with a simple search. Even if you break through the clutter and find something truly useful, the current information can be hard to separate from the old. The web has been missing a current top-to-bottom resource on the rel canonical tag. In this post, I’ll do my best to cover it all...
Last night at the SEOmoz meetup in Avi Wilensky's incredible office space, a frequent topic of discussion both during the presentations/Q+A and in smal...
Some of the Internet's most important pages from many of the most linked-to domains, are blocked by a robots.txt file. Does your website misuse the robots.txt file, too? Find out how search engines really treat robots.txt blocked files, entertain yourself with a few seriously flawed live examples, and learn how to avoid the same mistakes yourself.
Good morning Mozzers! Today we're going to walk you through some rather basic but far-too-oft overlooked conversion factors specifically for international SEO. Anyone who has had the pleasure of using ecommerce sites in multiple countries may have noticed that as a general rule the sites look pretty similar if not identical. Today we are going to walk you through some of the pros and con...
civil war n. A state of hostility or conflict between elements within an organization. Alright, so search marketing isn't really an "organization" but there is a certain hostility within its ranks. It's the war of the acronyms and funding. For years there have been articles, studies, and conference panels surrounding the debate of paid search versus organic search. That rivalry is rather ancient now considering the new kids on the block: CRO, SMO, and LPO. Who will win the war? Simple. If any one side wins the war in your organization, you are the loser.
In the past, I have tried several different ways to skip the first link that Google takes into account for a given URL (nofollowed links, links with 301 redirections, etc). However, all these attempts had little success (301 works but it's very suspect). Recently, I ran a test to see how Google handled the anchor links (links to different sections within the same page, eg: ...
This post is part of an ongoing series where my co-workers and I are working to build a resource center of up-to-date SEO best practices. As we write this content, we are submitting them for peer review so that everyone on the Internet can benefit from collective intelligence. You can read more about the ...
Lately I've been surprised to hear concerns from a number of SEOs that using the canonical URL tag on the canonical version of the page can somehow cause problems. When I've talked to folks about it, there seems to be confusion that only duplicates should use the rel="canonical" specification and the original must remain rel="canonical"-free. This isn't the case. Let...
Here's a directly actionable tip that any large brand should probably start doing right now. In fact most people should already have started doing it. Hopefully after reading this post they will. Take a look at these two searches: Promo Codes (US keyphrase:) ...